Although it’s still the best of breed e-reader out there (at least until Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader comes out), the Amazon Kindle certainly has room for improvement, including bad international support, a monochrome screen that is a tad too dark, no touch support and a slow refresh rate.

But if you’re a heavy reader of Kindle e-books, the biggest complaint you probably have is its terrible content organization. The Kindle contains sections for periodicals, books and your own custom content, but all it does is display these in long, alphabetical lists, with no efforts to break down by genre or author.

But Amazon heres your complaint, and on Facebook, they have promised to fix the issue.

“We have heard from many of you that you would like to have a better way to organize your growing Kindle libraries. We are currently working on a solution that will allow you to organize your Kindle libraries. We will be releasing this functionality as an over-the-air software update as soon as it is ready, in the first half of next year,” wrote Amazon.

That’s good news at first blush, but read between the lines and it looks hairier. First of all, Amazon’s not committing to anything besides a delivery date of June 30th, 2010… which is seven months away. Worse, organization is never going to be as good as the Nook, because while the Nook has a color LCD screen, the Kindle is limited to organization on a slowly updating e-paper display.

Amazon’s going to have to release a better Kindle next year if they intend to stay competitive. Slow to arrive firmware updates just aren’t going to cut it?

Reader Comments

John,
The Nook has yet to give a review copy to any gadget site, so it’s hard to know how well any of it functions, and the delays to both its own stores and consumers who pre-ordered don’t help.

Re “with no efforts to break down by genre or author” the Kindle does have a sorting mechanism for Authors as well as Titles.

It also offers to display only personal docs, only books, only subscriptions, or all-items, using the Sorts for Title, Author, and Most Recently read.
See http://bit.ly/kindleorg for what that looks like.

It needs more, and some of us use a tagging system via its Notes feature until they provide something programmed.